


In the Margins; Between the Lines

by Anam_Writes



Series: princes love dragons; it's just a fact [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route Spoilers, Fluff, Jeralt's Diary, Post-Time Skip, no beta; we die like men, references to difficult childhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:53:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22369762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anam_Writes/pseuds/Anam_Writes
Summary: Byleth recieves something she never thought to see again. Not only that but it would seem there are some additions.
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth & Claude von Riegan, My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: princes love dragons; it's just a fact [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610308
Comments: 11
Kudos: 221





	In the Margins; Between the Lines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ejunkiet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ejunkiet/gifts).



> Another short from tumblr I'm putting here. This time from an ask made by the wonderful Ejunkiet.

He’d wrapped it tightly in brown paper and rough string. 

When he’d come to her door, the rain sounding like small bits of stone bouncing from the walkway of the old dormitories, he’d been soaked. His coat was speckled in the stains of fresh water falling from the sky (nothing a good dry could not fix) and his long brown cloak looked as though he had fished it from the pond. His smile had been warm and bright, sharp against the cool, damp night. His hands had been slow and soft when he took the parcel from the folds of his coat and given it to Byleth. 

“It must feel like only a short while you’ve been apart from it,” he said, voice sitting in that honey toned tenor it reached when he spoke from his heart. Oh, his poor, battered, sweet heart. “But I’ve waited to return it for five long years.”

When Byleth holds it in her hands and raises it to lay flat against her chest she can almost feel those years as the little parcel had. As he had. 

“Thank you for keeping it safe, Claude,” she said. 

He nodded. He left. 

He’d never been one to linger in the depths of his own sincerity. Which is why Byleth did that for him. She closed the door and sighed, letting the fluttering in her belly run its course.

Now, she sits at her desk. Upon inspection it has been returned in better condition than when she’d given it. The worn edges of the cover have been replaced. The loose pull of the bindings are repaired. The leather has been polished and shines and the engravings are newly minted. Her father’s journal has been more than safe, it’s been pampered. 

She wonders if Claude keeps all he holds dear so well. 

Her face warms.

Careful, she opens her father’s journal and sees that there is new writing along the margins. Claude has underlined passages he believes to be important and made notes in his own hand. Her fingers trace her father’s writing, then Claude’s. Her father’s looped in long drags across the page skipping through descriptions of flowers, her mother’s smile, his feelings and the mundanities of his day. 

Claude has added in reminders of certain dates, tough sketches of where this fits in with the events of the last 20 years before her return to the monastery. His writing is rushed and small, reminding her almost of Hanneman’s note taking. Clinical. It is not until she reaches a few pages in that she finds the first instance of a new kind of note.

“Byleth,” it reads.

She blinks and compares the lettering, thinking at first that a second party had inspected the journal. But no, his T’s are crossed in the same manner and the tilt of his scrawl is consistent. It is much neater, prettier even, that the other things he wrote. It is more akin to how he writes his own poetry as opposed to a report; one is done with time and patience while the other is urgent and rushed. 

“Byleth,"it reads, and she follows that note to an underlined passage on the page. It is a description of a day when her mother had smiled at her father when he brought her a bouquet of flowers he’d kept alive all the way home from Fearghus. She had pointed out the nuances of the colour to him and used them to practice her arranging in her room. Jeralt write he had "never before thought he would tear up at the sight of flowers.”

She continues on.

Beside lines about her scaring off rowdy strangers in a village square simply by approaching them with her blank stare Claude wrote, “even as a child.”

A reminder is set near another story “ask Byleth for the name of that cat she loved when she comes back.”

Comes back? 

Something burns the back of her eyes. 

Another note of the like - after a depiction of the time Byleth skipped meals for a whole three days because a girl she had played with in town had called her a corpse - was more mournful than the rest. 

“How dare she.”

Byleth could feel that burning in her eyes come forward. She swallowed thick around what felt like a rock lodged in her throat. 

Claude was not one to hold grudges with frightened little girls real to him only in the pages of a book. 

His suggestion that Rhea stay lost rang through her ears. 

His anger, his contempt, it was not something that grew over the years from his own beliefs about Fódlan’s goddess. It was for her. 

Byleth runs her thumb over a smudge in the note.

The pattering of rain outside reminds her of the speckles on his coat, of water running down his cheek.

The heat in her eyes falls molten to the page. 

He had cried for her too. 

Byleth closes her father’s journal with care. With gentle hands she places it in her drawer. 

She’d have to thank him. Maybe one day she’d figure out how.


End file.
